BALER, AURORA—The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources is now accepting investors in its 300-hectare mariculture park in Aurora’s northern town of Casiguran for the commercial production of bangus (milkfish) and export of apahap (sea bass).

“We are ready to accept investors,” BFAR Director Malcolm Sarmiento Jr. said here on Friday.
Proposed by Sen. Edgardo Angara, a former agriculture secretary, the project has been approved by the Casiguran government through a resolution declaring part of the Casiguran Sound (bay) a mariculture park.
Sarmiento said the BFAR had provided the materials to lay down the moorings and boundaries, all of which would cost P5 million.

Start-up

The agency has also brought 100 bangus breeders to the capital town of Baler, where a P5-million hatchery is being built. The Department of Agriculture has built an ice plant in Casiguran to support the project, Sarmiento said.
The mariculture park, the 25th that the bureau has put up, sits in “one of the best locations in the Philippines,” he said.

Markets

“It has a ready market for bangus. The neighboring provinces of Quirino, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya and Nueva Ecija are already captured markets because they don’t have bangus production there,” he said.
A sea cage is estimated to produce five tons of milkfish after at least three months. A hectare can accommodate about 20 cages.